S-Dot
November 6, 2016, 9:03am
31
But what octane is giving unity and ue4 is a progressive renderer to replace lightmass to bake lightmaps. If you’ve used vray before they introduced their progressive renderer you’d know how big of a deal it was. I think it came with version 3.0. Corona is a progressive render too. Lightmaps generation with lightmass is too unpredictable and you cannot have a decent preview (for archviz, that means we won’t have to make 56 test bakes until we like what we see). Of course if you are making a game it’s not the same requirements. Octane is not going to be a new real-time renderer. It will be a new offline renderer within the game editor. It’s a new complimentary tool. It could’ve been just an offline renderer to make nicer stills, panos, etc. but on top of that it will be able to bake lightmaps.
Lightmass was intended for gaming and it’s enough for that purpose. But like it or not ue4 is starting to get traction in other industries and they have different needs
This is what progressive lightmap baking looks like, tell me it’s not better than lightmass where you can sit there for hours and have no clue what your shadows will look like once done :
https://imgtec.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/PowerVR-Ray-Tracing-Unite-2014-Unity-5-lightmap-editor-s1.gif
***Read this post on reddit, Otoy confirm ue4 path tracer is in development. This is what it looks like. Instant High quality preview before baking high quality lightmaps.https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/5au90v/otoys_jules_urbach_on_octanerender_unity/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RSpc3JBosF4
This looks good but we have to wait and see if it really is better or if it just has other problems. Also we need to see how the renderer works once you put 300.000 vert vray assets in the scene ;). Does it support real time at all? It’s good to have an instant preview but do be honest I think I would go mental if I had to work with this feature.
I don’t agree that light mass is very slow. It is only slow if you change certain settings. A preview build takes a lot less time and it will give you a good impression of what the production render will be.